7 Comments
Nov 3Liked by Nicolas D Villarreal

Hi Nico

I am wondering if you have read Julian Jayne’s ‘The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind’? I would be interested in hearing your thoughts.

Expand full comment
author

I haven't read it myself but I'm vaguely familiar with it. I would say that yes, consciousness is learned, but that doesn't imply all that stuff about a bicameral mind that came before it.

Expand full comment

Yes, the theory of consciousness itself is basically Vygotsky or Ilyenkov which is not very controversial for Marxists. But the idea of human experience lacking an ‘I’, facilitated by auditory and visual hallucination, reinforced by religious and spiritual material practice is interesting. I guess I am disappointed there is not more talk about it beyond textual analysis of ancient society, given we are encountering hallucination in LLMs that similarly lack an ‘I’.

Expand full comment
author

I talk a little bit about this possibility in my recent essay on materialism https://cosmonautmag.com/2024/07/what-is-materialism/

"The break in Althusser’s tautology of “ideological subjects” comes when we consider the fact that concrete, individual subjects can be interpellated as ideological non-subjects. This fact was empirically demonstrated with the public rollout of the LLM based chatbot “Bing” also known as Sydney. After a period of weird public interactions through the appearance of a pseudo-personality emerging from the bot, Microsoft included instructions in the bot’s pre-prompt to never allow it to discuss or refer to itself even in the most abstract fashion.22 All this is to bring attention to the fact that the coordinate of “I” is not simply or necessarily the direct reflection of “you”; it is one which only exists in a particular social and linguistic context. Descartes’ famous pronouncement “I think therefore I am” was only possible through access to the linguistic tool of “I.” But there is still a possible statement one can make without it; that is, an ontological expression of being without a subject: “there is annunciation, therefore there is.”

This expression of annunciation, and therefore existence, without a subject may seem unsatisfying to us, and missing something important, but this is precisely because the existence of the subject is something which is known to us as a scientific, material fact. The subject exists objectively, it is known and experienced as a part of the external world. Indeed, Descartes’ idealism betrays the conceit of all idealism, smuggling into pure being our knowledge of the material world which was supposed to be the object of existential suspicion. What was supposed to be the expression of pure thought, was in fact the expression of a thought shaped by particular material circumstances. Without experience of existing in a material world, and interacting with it as an agent, Descartes would have no proof that this expression of his was really produced by him at all, only that it was produced, that it existed, and therefore that something existed.

This fact that Althusser’s tautology isn’t a tautology after all has important consequences for history and his own examples. The process of interpellation as a type of human activity in the sense of someone hailing another to interpellate them, after all, had to be invented, it did not spring into being with the discovery of language or the process of signification. Before this invention, interpellation was a process without a subject, either as an interpellator or interpellated. Early religions were not like Christianity, they did not have evangelizers seeking to directly shape subjects, nor did early court systems necessarily seek out guilt, confession, and penance quite like ours do today. Early religions interpellated people passively by creating a cosmology that was often indistinguishable from scientific theory and practices at the time. Certainly, the people of early civilizations were not non-subjects in the way Sydney was, but the practice of directly calling to someone to shape them was not yet a part of systematized knowledge. If we were to extrapolate to prehistory, it seems possible that the very first human ancestors capable of something resembling language could very well have been non-subjects, although any claim either way would be pure speculation. However, the rise of AI now means that the social possibility of subjects interpellated as non-subjects may no longer be purely theoretical speculation. "

Expand full comment
author

So, with reference to the bicameral mind, I wouldn't say it's impossible, I would simply say that it's just speculation without any concrete evidence.

Expand full comment

Thanks! This is exactly what I was looking for.

Expand full comment